Smartphones to help monitor roads built under PM scheme

In a bid to keep tabs on the quality of roads built under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), the ministry of rural development has distributed smartphones to its officials, and asked them to upload photos to the ministry website when on inspection visits.

The initiative was introduced early this year on a pilot basis and has now been universalised.

According to official sources, the smartphones enabled with global positioning systems (GPS) have been handed out to the state quality monitors, who carry out periodic inspections of roads built by PMGSY. The phones have an inbuilt app, specially created for this initiative, to help them upload the photos on the website.

“Under the new initiative, the monitor’s will inspect a stretch of road and upload the photos to help those of us in Delhi asses the quality of roads,” a senior ministry official told HT.

Earlier, the monitors took photographers with them and the entire process of clicking the photos and uploading them was quite tedious. Now, the officials do not need photographers and the process has been made a lot quicker.

The monitors usually are retired engineers hired by state governments.

The PMGSY is a flagship programme under which rural areas are connected by concrete roads.

Under the programme, more than 50,000km of roads have been built since 2,000, when it was first launched by the then Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee.